At the beginning of my last Mandarin class, I had a question for my teacher.

“We’ve already done weather,” she warns gently, as I tentatively begin speaking about the rain.

“Today we’re doing directions.”

But the rainy season in China, is a difficult subject to ignore. Fat rain drops thud regularly against the skylight over our heads, as they have done for the past three days. The city has been flooded, planes grounded and many pairs of shoes ruined.

Between mid-June and early July, China has her rainy season, also known as the plum rains.

As this sweet fruit ripens across the Yangtze Delta, temperatures soar, humidity rises and the air is thick with water. Usefully, the word plum also sounds like ‘mouldy’ in Chinese, which is an accurate way to describe how your house smells after a week of the deluge.

This year, the plum rain season has coincided with my two-month-old daughter developing an immune system. As her gut flora flowers, so the rain comes down. And the two have become inextricably linked in the mind of our Chinese nanny and housekeeper (ayi).

Every time my baby strains, her tummy trials visible, my ayi looks out the window and ominously notes the wet leaves brushing the panes.

Not washing your hair for a month. Not using your mobile phone. And not going outdoors.

These are some of the commonly cited rules of zuoyuezi, the four-week period of confinement after labour, popular in China and across Asia.

Of course, such rules are easy to mock. And I did before I had my first daughter.

That’s not to say that I haven’t showered for four weeks. (Seriously?) Instead I hired an ayi (translates as ‘auntie’) to help with the housework and inadvertently joined the ranks of the confined.

It happened slowly at first. I ate this woman’s delicious soups, found myself staying in bed with my daughter ’till lunchtime and took frequent naps. Until at one point, I realised that I hadn’t left the house for a week, had no intention of getting out of my pyjamas and my anxiety levels had started to drop.

It turns out that a period of confinement post-birth is really nothing more than someone else giving you a chance to eat and sleep well, as you adapt to the hands-on routine of motherhood.

Yes. Not such a silly idea.

My ayi fussed around me and my daughter with the love and attention of a family member, despite the fact I’d only hired her to help clean and cook.

And ironically, I found I had plenty of time to wash my hair. And blow dry it too.

Not so for new mums across the world, however. My Western friends kept mentioning on Facebook how clean my hair looked ‘for a new mum’.

Battling your way through this early period without support – or showers – is not only considered normal in the West, but a rite of passage.

Whereas in China, for the first few weeks at least, there’s a useful cultural expectation that new parents should receive help and definitely not be reduced to nervous wrecks.

Types of confinement vary hugely, from calling on family and friends, or hiring part-time help, to booking a room in a confinement centre room, with doctors, nurses and midwives on call round-the-clock.

Choices will depend on a mother’s background and budget. For example, a reasonably priced centre in Shanghai costs £7,000 for 28 days. While a live-in professional confinement ‘yuesao’ can be as little as £500 a month.

But the aim is the same. To encourage the mother and father to take care of themselves and their baby as well as possible.

I had wrongly assumed that professional confinement services would preclude the involvement of the father. But no, modern confinement centres welcome dads too.

Of course, it’s hardly a revelation to state that having help around the home is a blessing to new parents. But equally it’s useful to note that age-old traditions, stripped of superstition and given a new lease of life, can challenge our assumption about modern norms.

The first time we took our newly born daughter out for a walk in Shanghai, we caused a minor local sensation. Forget Instagram shots of Kourtney Kardashian breastfeeding in Vegas. Jaws visibly dropped as we sauntered by carrying our daughter – without a hat.

Middle-aged women in quilted jackets rushed to peer into the baby carrier on my husband’s chest.

Just tall enough to peep their eyes into her cocoon, the women’s eyes widened at the sight of our three-day old daughter – hatless, outdoors and alive.

In China, it is considered dangerous to dress a child in an outfit that offers less warmth than a duck-feather duvet.

My new housekeeper confidently explained that we should dress young Scarlett in socks and a sleep-suit until the beginning of June, when the thermometer regularly hits 30 degrees and the humidity soars.

I smiled, and unwrapped my baby from a tight swaddle for the umpteenth time.

It’s also customary for newborns to stay at home with the mother for a month after being born. During this period of ‘confinement’, both will be expected to rest, and any attempts to leave the house are thwarted by well-meaning relatives.

Children can never wear too many layers

Said baby certainly doesn’t go gallivanting around town in a carrier attached to the husband’s chest, without a hat, while mum disappears into the grocers to buy apples.

I mean that’s a recipe for….

Well actually no one knows, because it’s never been tried.

From a few metres away, where I was buying fruit, I watched my husband attempt to navigate the furious exchange of comments happening across his daughter’s head.

Some were convinced my child would get pneumonia. Even though it was 18 degrees out. And that’s not how you get pneumonia.

They were also sure that we must be lying about her age, because no sane parent would take a three-day old baby out for a walk.

For every significant occasion Ellen always makes me an amazing, funny, homemade card so to mark this momentous occasion I decided to make her a homemade card with photos and drawings and a smattering of sentimental reminiscences.

Unfortunately, having had four children very close together, all their childhoods pretty much merge into one so it’s hard to make sentimental observations when you can’t remember which child did what.

Luckily, the young me must have foreseen that the future me wouldn’t remember a thing, so for 11 years I kept journals with photos and drawings of what the children were up to.

I sat down to have a look to remind myself what Ellen was like as a baby, toddler and little girl and feel that warm self congratulatory glow I assumed I’d feel having successfully raised a child to adulthood.

Instead I was struck by what a terrible mother I was and how amazing it is that

Ellen DID reach adulthood but also how funny the whole process is and how at two and three you can already tell what kind of an adult they’re going to be.

Entries included:

Ellen DRANK VODKA.

We had friends for drinks last night and someone left their glass on the floor by the sofa. I was feeding Maddie when I spotted it so hid it thinking I must get rid of that later or Ellen will find it. I forgot about it. I saw Ellen walking down the stairs with her tongue hanging out, scraping at it with her hands. I ran over to check what was wrong. She smelt distinctly of vodka, then I remembered about the glass. She was quite cheerful.

Ellen does her first painting.

I bought squeeze out poster paints paper and a pinny and set her up in the kitchen. She flatly refused to wear the pinny and only wanted to use the red and black paint. She painted with great passion and dedication all morning. The resulting mess was pretty spectacular and she had varying shades of red paint smeared up her arms and down her front and on her face. By the time she’d finished the kitchen looked like she’d butchered a small animal. I have stuck the pictures on the fridge. They are all ‘untitled.’

Ellen bites the top off my favourite lipstick and eats it.

I let her put some on thinking what harm can it do? Left the room to pick up Maddie who’d woken from her nap and returned to see Ellen standing in front of the mirror with the decapitated lipstick, chewing away. No apparent ill effects, except to my £11 lipstick.

Ellen ‘shaves’ using Dan’s razor and shaving foam.

She did a bad job and now has 3 cuts on her face that she seems oblivious to. Combined with the terrible haircut I gave her yesterday she now looks like a child ‘at risk’ and I need to be reported to the NSPCC, all she needs now is a black eye to finish off the look.

Ellen cuts Maddie’s hair

I gave her proper scissors to cut up old Christmas cards as the toy ones weren’t working. I went out of the room for probably FIVE MINUTES and returned to the announcement that she’d got rid of ‘Maddie’s fizzy bits’. This is the fluffy hair on the back of Maddie’s head. Maddie v pleased and kept patting her head and nodding and saying “haircut.” All eyes and ears still intact. Couldn’t tell Ellen off as I was laughing too much.

Ellen makes jam tarts (no jam used)

Thought it would be a fun afternoon activity but she said it was ‘boring’ and refused to put any jam in them and just kept surreptitiously eating it straight from the jar. She was sick later.

Ellen decorates ginger bread house.

I kept trying to get her to stick the sweets on the house rather than just eat them. In the end after a lot of nagging and threatening to take them away if she didn’t STICK THEM ON THE HOUSE, she spat a half eaten fruit pastille out of her mouth and stuck it on the roof. Nice job.

Just like back then Ellen is still artistic, strong willed, adventurous, creative, a reluctant cook with a VERY sweet tooth - and a big vodka fan.

However, while I’m positive that all those VVIP tickets will be snapped up – because the UAE is what it is – I do hope there are some parents who hold back despite being able to afford all of them simply because they’re trying to bring up children who don’t have ridiculous expectations of life.

Among all the other challenges of bringing up children in a foreign country, expat parents – especially those in… Read more

Last week, a tragic storymade the news here. It was about two housemaids who drowned in a hotel swimming pool while trying to rescue their employers’ young children. While the tragedy unfolded, the parents were in their hotel room, having entrusted the care of their children to the maids. Neither the maids nor the children could swim. Thankfully for the parents, their children were saved by a tourist who saw the commotion. The parents are subsequently suing the hotel for not having a lifeguard on duty.

I know, I know. This story is disturbing on so many levels we could discuss it ad infinitum, but my job is not to judge. We all know that children are the sole responsibility of the parents and that, ultimately, no matter what mistakes are made by whom, the buck stops with them.

Or do we? Amazingly, just 66 per cent of respondents in a recent pollin Dubaisaid it was the parents’ responsibility to bring up the children “and not that of a maid” – the other 34 per cent presumably thinking it was okay for the maid to bring up their children. Also surprisingly, only six per cent of respondents said they were “unwilling to leave their children in the care of a minimum-wage cleaner”.

But, again, I’m not judging. Without extended family around us and, with many working mums left to cope single-handedly while their husbands travel for work, there are bound to be gaps in the childcare that need plugging. But, while we may not be able to control the circumstances around us, what we can control is to whom we hand the care of our children.

It’s a hot topic here. There’s not a mum in the UAE who won’t have a fierce opinion on whether or not a housemaid is adequately qualified to look after her children.

And by “housemaid”, I mean exactly that. Part of the problem in Dubai is that the difference between a “housemaid” and a “nanny” appears to come down to nothing more than syntax. While most Westerners are aware that a nanny is a trained childcare specialist and a maid is a lady who can mop a floor without leaving streaks, many still choose to employ an unskilled domestic worker and assume that, by calling her “the nanny” (pronounced with an affected drawl) she’ll take on the role of childcare specialist.

Probably, most of the time she’ll do a pretty good job – many mums don’t leave their children exclusively with the housemaid, and many of the housemaids have far more patience with children than do their harried employers. But, unless the housemaid’s been trained as a nanny – with the relevant qualifications in child development, first aid, injury prevention and, for the UAE’s swimming pool environment, life-saving – she really isn’t a nanny and shouldn’t be treated as such – for her own sake as much as for her employers’ peace of mind.

“Housemaids are often given more responsibility than they can handle,”said Back to Basics training company yesterday, in response to the drowning tragedy. The company is apparently in talks with the government to make it compulsory for all housemaids in the UAE to receive childcare training. Good as that may be, sometimes I wonder if we should start with parent training.

Annabel Kantaria is a journalist who moved to Dubai long before most people knew where it was. She doesn’t ride a camel to work; has never seen a gold-plated golf buggy and only rarely has pink champagne for breakfast. Follow her on Twitter: @BellaKay

With their A-level results in, students the world over will soon be preparing for the start of college or university next month. And while, for most students, going to university can mean moving out of home for the first time, for expat students it often requires a move overseas as well.

But how do these expat kids cope with living alone in a new country if they’ve had it too easy growing up in the UAE? I bet there are more than a few concerned mums asking themselves right now if they’ve done enough to prepare their teenagers for an independent life abroad.